Forthcoming in Antipode 47(2) early next year, Mahito Hayashi’s ‘Rescaled “Rebel Cities”, Nationalization, and the Bourgeois Utopia: Dialectics Between Urban Social Movements and Regulation for Japan’s Homeless‘ is now available online.

Urban social movements and regulation have co-evolved in Japan to deal with homelessness. In his Antipode paper, Mahito theorises their development and the ways in which they relate, exploring what he calls the “dialectics between two opposing forces – ‘commoning’ and ‘othering’ – both of which in my view are always internalised in today’s ‘rebel cities’…”. He focuses on movements in the struggle against policing and workfare that have attempted to radically open-up public spaces within ‘zones of weakness’, looking at ‘rescaling’ dialectics in Yokohama and ‘nationalizing’ dialectics in Tokyo. Finally, Mahito puts Engels’ ‘(petit-)bourgeois utopia’ to work, arguing that commoning projects and imaginaries are constrained – but not completely… – by capitalist urban forms that ‘other’ the homeless.

You can watch Mahito – who teaches at Kinjo Gakuin University, Japan –  talking about his paper below. Also check out his recent papers in EPA and IJURR: ‘Urban Poverty and Regulation, New Spaces and Old: Japan and the U.S. in Comparison‘; and ‘Times and Spaces of Homeless Regulation in Japan, 1950s–2000s: Historical and Contemporary Analysis‘.